I don’t know this David, but fuck them.
Next time I’ll read the article before knee jerking. As it turns out, they don’t say it’s too late to act, rather that it’s too late to still count on changes from the political and economical domination structures.
Leaving the rest here because it’s still true.Climate change isn’t an on/off switch, it’s something that can always be made better or worse by increments.
Yes we’re going over 1.5°C and almost surely over 2°, world is gonna become hell for hundreds of millions of people (usually those least responsible for climate change) as it has already for dozens millions.
But we’re still better at 2.2 than 2.3. Or at 3.7 than 3.8. Or 3.0 than 3.1.
Humanity’s survival is not at stake, but the lives of countless people are. If by our action we can reduce the number of people sufdering/dying from climate change even by 0.0001%, it’s still worth the fucking fight.TLDR: never too late to go vegan, stop traveling by plane or bombing oil companies exec offices and cars.~~
Climate change isn’t an on/off switch, it’s something that can always be made better or worse by increments.
I’m just speaking to the accuracy of this one sentence. This is completely 100% incorrect.
The climate system is a chaos system that has many areas of stability, rapid transformation and tipping points.
If you think the system is only incrementally changing, that’s just because you haven’t pushed it hard enough to rapidly shift to a new area of behavior you’ve never seen before.
Many of these regimes are irreversible and cannot be changed back. You cannot unburn toast, it’s a one way deal.
Once the climate changes, EVEN if you reset the conditions, you will not return to the initial state. Not at all. That idea is propaganda.
The fossil carbon and other climate related chemicals we have already dumped into the environment have a very long lag time before we see the effects (at all). These chemicals and their effects are more long living that most nuclear waste, for example. These are not going away while humanity still exists. That’s a done deal.
I think you’re right, but I don’t think OP would necessarily disagree (although I don’t know them).
The point is, we don’t really know where, or how many, tipping points there are. Every 0.1 degree warming is a higher chance of reaching them. And most climate models predict very different outcones for 2 degree vs 3 degree vs 4 degree warming.
So, there are a bunch of lags effects and tipping points, but we still don’t have any information to suggest that every 0.1 degree avoided has huge value.
Many people have been manipulated into thinking of this whole problem as a “flow” or “rate” problem.
“If we could only slow down carbon…”
The thing is that what we have is a “sink” or “stock” problem where it’s how much carbon is already in the system – it’s past actions that are already closed off to further change that are influencing things now
The rate of change in climate isn’t from the rate of this year’s contribution of 4ppm of CO2, it’s from having 423ppm in the system all together forcing a very large shift in energy imbalance.
There is no solution space where slowing down the rate is meaningful. Going to zero or net negative for the ANNUAL rate next year is too small a lever against what work would need to happen to make a meaningful difference.
The TOTAL HISTORICAL carbon that is already there would have to be entirely removed and even that wouldn’t put the system all the way back due to inertia and other nonlinearities.
What you’re feeling today in the climate is actually geared to the emissions levels that were already achieved no more recently than 15 years ago in the past. What we do today will have effects that will only start in 15 years and take a long time to fully play out with effects still coming into play 100 years from today. This is a very very long lag time that confuses everything in terms of human feedbacks and human proof and human priorities.
A great number of people think we know what to do but we were too greedy and corrupt to do it.
I disagree. I think we have no idea what to even do. Humanity does not have the technology or capability to be sustainable. And so we think and talk about it wrongly because we do not want to accept that we are doomed.
Just to back up what your saying MIT have a nice explainer on carbon lifetimes[0].
I don’t know if I feel as doomed as you though. There is a lot of technology to reduce carbon (renewables etc). And moreover, a lot of the carbon use today is completely unecessary consumerism.
We’ve had 30 years of political inertia since Regan/Thatcher/etc so political change seems impossible to a lot of folks. Historically that’s just not the case. Before then, voter rights, civil rights, women’s rights all made huge political changes. If there’s any silver lining to the horror show of US politics at the moment, it should be that there is at least proof that massive structural change is possible in today’s political climate, and I genuinely believe that can be harnessed for good.
I don’t think there’s any guarantees, but it’s still a lot too early to give up.
[0] https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-do-we-know-how-long-carbon-dioxide-remains-atmosphere
There is a lot of technology to reduce carbon (renewables etc).
You’re only talking about reducing the rate of increases. That’s irrelevant. Carbon would still be growing, not shrinking.
As I stated, we need a way to decrease the existing carbon, which is a different, much larger problem, with no technology and nothing waiting in the wings. We have no ideas. Renewable or rebuildable power systems could be useful, but how does that power suck fossil carbon out of the biosphere, what’s the tech for that?
The closest thing I’ve heard of is sulfur dioxide injection, which could apparently reduce greenhouse effects. However, if we implemented this and ever stopped doing it before decreasing the current levels of carbon, it could result in more rapid heating, which would be more damaging to wildlife due to the greater speed with which survivors would have to migrate.
That’s geoengineering to reduce the strength of sunlight to get heat down. It has to be repeated indefinitely, forever, or heat increases again.
Also, it doesn’t reverse what’s causing climate change by removing carbon.
how does that power suck fossil carbon out of the biosphere, what’s the tech for that?
Does it have to be tech? Ocean plankton, peat bogs, forests, etc all do a great job of removing and storing carbon. They’re being destroyed currently, but we could choose to bolster them instead.
Those are also technologies, just not high tech.
Here is a question then:
According to the science, the ocean current changes are going to start driving climate change via a doubling of present day CO2. When the permafrost melts it will create as much additional CO2 as all human industry does on a repeating annual basis right now. This is an all natural process where CO2 pollution will snowball faster and faster with no human ability to adjust it.
so, do you think natural processes like growing trees have the potential where they going to erase that much feedback? Keeping in mind that the peat bogs, forests and ocean plankton we have today in a less damaged ecosystem ALREADY failed to curtail a much smaller human created CO2 pulse?
Hmm?
What you’re talking about is BECCS, by the way. Believe me or don’t, but the UN climate change panel already included this in all the accounting! Like, what the projections for the future say is that we are going to invent these technologies and deploy them and erase the CO2, and that’s assumed to be real and already factored into all the future projections…and they are still talking about 8 degrees of warming even including that. Notwithstanding that we have never done this yet and don’t know if it works.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. No one knows what to do about it or they know they can’t stop what’s already been done, so why bother even trying to change. This is what got humans here in the first place, we pretend we know answers when we don’t, or at least say some paltry offering as making a difference. We can adapt to the changes that are coming, but it means reinventing our entire way of life, and the people at the top of the pile don’t t want to upset the system where they are at the top of the pile. Change has to come from the people, forcing the change. Our leaders have proven themselves incapable of breaking from the shackles of the old so we won’t make it to the new way unless we make it happen. We can’t leave it to others anymore, we have to do it.
Yep. There is a lot of hubris.
In general right wing folks don’t believe we have a big problem, which is literal denial.
In general left wing folks believe we can solve the problem easily without much sacrifice, which is denial of the implications.
When right wing people look at left wing people they think the solutions are not going to work and would be a big scary change and a sure loss of our way of life.
When left wing people look at right wing people they think that they are stupid for being pragmatic and realist instead of idealistic and fantastical.
Its a game where both sides blame one another and decades slip comfortably by while we remain deadlocked.
Humanity does not have the technology or capability to be sustainable
We absolutely have the technology, it’s just being blocked from being implemented on emergency timescales by soulless oil and gas corpo suits that have almost de-facto control of governments in most countries.
What’s an example of the technology, and can you explain what scale it works at?
- Solar and Wind power are cheap and are infinitely scalable on both small and large scales.
- Public transport massively reduces energy requirements for transportation, and scales from bullet trains to light rail. Bike paths combined with ebikes can be used for smaller scales.
- Vegan diets massively reduce emissions and energy requirements to produce calories for a population
- Iron-air batteries are right now viable as an alternative to fossil fuel powered container ships. They are viable at large scales. For small scale between short distances, sailboats are still quite viable.
- High density urban planning done by the Edenicity plan reduces suburban sprawl and massively reduces energy consumption by allowing for an urban area to be energy and food self sufficient. This concept scales to both small villages or large cities.
The tech is there. The only thing stopping us is a lack of political will due to capitalism resulting in oligarchs who have captured the political system, and a lack of public awareness of alternative ways of life due to poor education and propaganda.
A properly informed public that understands the extreme dangers of climate change, oligarchic capitalism, and the viability of changing things with collective power would allow us to use these existing technologies and prevent the devastation we’re headed toward.
Those are all ways to reduce the flow of new carbon emissions, but they don’t address the issue if the carbon that’s already in the atmosphere, which is what they’re talking about.
This would be things like more effective carbon capture technologies or sulfur dioxide injection. The point they’re making is that just slowing down the rate that new carbon is added or even stopping new carbon from being added at all isn’t sufficient to stop the runaway effects.
Never mind that the current regime in the US is on track to actually increase carbon emissions.
Suzuki is a leading climate activist, worth learning more about. https://davidsuzuki.org/story/pipeline-blockade-is-a-sign-of-deeper-troubles/
Yeah, he’s also a raging alcoholic – like town drunk levels in one of the communities he’s got one of his houses in. He’s got at least four homes around the world, and jets back and forth no doubt. He’s got 5 kids of his own, yet preaches that people shouldn’t have so many kids. He lives a very high-polluting lifestyle for someone that built a brand on being green.
There, I learned some things!
Le sigh
It’s honestly incredible that that’s his point and the headline twists it into ‘the fight is lost’. Like he’s literally saying that we need to step outside of these institutions that are designed to capture and neuter our political imagination, and instead we should use our power of direct action, and the author said, “okay but my imagination is completely captured so I interpret that to mean that the fight is lost, actually”.
Well, unless it’s an exponential kind of a thing, right?
It’s not your fault that the title is sensationalist.
You are right, but life will always find a way, but we won’t necessarily. The powers of this world have shown their colours, we asked them to play nice and fair and created systems to hold them in check. They just bought their way into leader of the free world and have gutted all that hard work of the last 75 years so they can go back to being incredibly shitty. As many of us go vegan or use paper straws, the worse culprits for waste streams are the creators, not the users/consumers and things will continue to get worse. Money is the root of all evil in that it drives decisions over the health and wellbeing of people, animals, the environment or the planet. Anything for a buck…
Maybe the long term fight we can still win is ‘Can we do enough to keep the possibility that humans might become extinct over the coming centuries off the table at 2100’.
Does it matter whether humanity goes extinct? Not really, that’s isn’t the big challenge. Human suffering is.
None of it really matters all that much to me, at this point. But I am pretty sure that humankind having some sort of potentially achievable long term goal, and crucially (when it comes to trying to stop climate change) tries to fight a battle that isn’t already lost, is the only way forward.
It’s the road to that extinction and how the billons behave while dwindling away to 0 that sucks yep.
as a yotuber said, they already abandoned quite a while ago, the moment they were funding companies that were reccommending “carbon free footprint, carbon footprint reduction products” is you know they arnt reducing thier own output emissions.
